


In The Gale

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, The Unremarkable House (X-Files)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25866649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: She bites at the fleshy part of her thumb. This is real, she thinks. This place.It is not down in any map; true places never are
Relationships: Fox Mulder & Dana Scully, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 10
Kudos: 96





	In The Gale

**Author's Note:**

> For Perplexistan, who asked and then helped me make it better. This is shortly after settling into the Unremarkable House. I tried making sense of their legal status, but it’s simply impossible and I gave up.
> 
> Our heroes quote from Melville, Shakespeare, Sagan, Baudrillard, and (Emily) Dickens.

Because I know that time is always time  
And place is always and only place  
And what is actual is actual only for one time  
And only for one place  
I rejoice that things are as they are and  
I renounce the blessed face  
And renounce the voice  
Because I cannot hope to turn again  
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something  
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us  
And pray that I may forget  
These matters that with myself I too much discuss  
Too much explain  
Because I do not hope to turn again  
Let these words answer  
For what is done, not to be done again  
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly  
But merely vans to beat the air  
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry  
Smaller and dryer than the will  
Teach us to care and not to care  
Teach us to sit still.

T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

***

She recites _The Raven_ to herself on the drive in, lists all the state capitals in alphabetical order, and goes through the periodic table. Her body fizzes like a shaken soda, tiny anxious bubbles rising through her blood. They’ve done so much for this, called in so many favors. Mulder put his book on hold for a month, quizzing her with dog-eared notecards. 

“Immediate treatment of myocardial infarction,” he’d call, and she’d say “MONA TASS.”

She feels a pang for the simplicity of the other life, the hiding one, where she just had to ring up cigarettes and herbal Viagra at gas stations.

***

She’s the new girl at the cafeteria table, awkward and alone. Mulder had prepared her a lunch like it’s the first day of school, and she stares at it, wishing for an appetite.

From the corner of her eye she sees two colleagues - an MRI tech and an obstetrician, she thinks - talking softly and glancing over. Scully thinks she hears “FBI,” and she looks up and smiles, uncertain.

They blink at her, look away.

***

Ybarra comes around the corner, gliding in his cassock like a disapproving ghost. “Dr. Scully,” he says, in his pinched voice.

She smiles thinly. “Father Ybarra.”

“Nurse Mossing was looking for the chart for Mrs. Sullivan. Imagine my surprise when I found it in Room 314 instead of Room 413. That’s a potential HIPAA violation, Dr. Scully. That’s a federal law.”

Scully curls her hand so that her nails dig into her skin. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Father Ybarra, please forg-”

He holds up his palm. “It won’t happen again,” he says, and glides onward.

Scully closes her eyes and leans against the wall. She breathes through her nose until the ringing in her ears stops.

***

She wants to collapse into his arms and cry when she gets home, but that would be giving in. It would be letting them down.

“How’d it go?” he asks. He’s wearing basketball shorts and a Knicks shirt, a five o’clock shadow.

She smiles brightly. “It was good. Learning curve, but good. I think Father Ybarra might be a tough nut to crack, is all.”

Mulder rubs his cowlicked hair. “Put your feet up, Scully, since you won’t wear sensible shoes.”

She does, and accepts the glass of wine he holds out. “Thanks. I’ll sleep well tonight, anyway. There are miles of hallways.”

He sits next to her on the couch. “I wrote a few pages,” he says. “I deleted a bunch, but I think there was a multi-paragraph net gain.”

“I’m glad you’re able to stop focusing on my stuff now,” she says. “Both back in the saddle.”

“Go team.”

She clinks her glass against his. She drinks her wine too fast.

***

Ybarra had come in during her rounds that morning and startled her into knocking a metal bedpan onto the floor. Scully thinks the reverberations of that sound will follow her to the grave.

She’s now in the chapel, tucked into a back pew. She’s been staring at the small altar, at the stained glass windows flanking the crucifix. The Blessed Virgin smiles beatifically down at her, a wretched sinner.

Scully laces her fingers on the back of the pew in front of her and bows her head against them. “Please,” she whispers. “ _Please_.”

***

Mulder wakes her with tea and eggs. “You haven’t been eating,” he says, brow furrowed. 

She rubs her eyes, yawning. “What?”

He sits next to her on the bed, sets the plate and mug on her night table. “You just push your food around your plate, you hardly talk when you get home. What’s going on, Scully?”

She sits up, looking at his worried face. He’s sun-browned and tousled, beautiful, with a mouth that still makes her weak in the knees. “Nothing. It’s just a lot to jump back into.”

“I’m sure it is. And I still want to help you with it.” He pulls the flash cards from his pocket, touches her wrist with his other hand. “Let’s see - causes of upper zone pulmonary fibrosis?”

She looks at the ceiling, back at him. “I don’t need help.”

Mulder blinks, stung. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. You just don’t need to hover over me. You have your own things to work on. Work on your book, patch up your henhouse. ” Her voice sounds snappish to her own ears.

His changeable eyes, now mossy green, darken. He chews his bottom lip, nodding slowly. “I thought you were one of my ‘things.’ Sorry to bother you.” He rises, walks downstairs.

“Mulder,” she whispers.

The tea goes down fine. Scully tries to eat the eggs but feels bile rise in her throat. She flushes them down the toilet instead of leaving them behind, because that is love.

***

She arrives at the nurses’ station on the second floor with three dozen donuts and two cardboard boxes of coffee. She deposits them on the desk. “Good morning, Annabel,” she says.

“Anne _liese_ ,” the woman says.

Scully nods, walks away.

*** 

He slides his hand up her pajama top, tracing circles on her ribs, sliding his fingers around to her breasts. He kisses the back of her neck. “Scully,” he whispers, his breath warm and ticklish in her ear.

She wants to pretend to wake up, to turn towards him and lose herself in his body. She wants to tell him everything, to be held and loved and petted and reassured. She wants him to remind her that she once stared down Congress, that some backwater priest and his prickly staff should be a joke to her. She wants them to laugh together at these silly, petty people.

But she can’t, she can’t disappoint him. He’s been so proud of her.

Scully stays still, breathes evenly until his hands move away and she’s alone again.

***

Her car rattles over the driveway, through shimmering waves of heat that rise from the crisping grass. It is the kind of late July afternoon where the sun is a hazy white ball in the west, and clouds of gnats are a permanent feature of the landscape. 

Scully parks, avoiding a puddle in which a peacock is standing. Mulder has recently become enamored of yard fowl. She narrows her eyes at it while opening the car door. 

“Good boy, Kevin,” she calls to it, wary.

Scully picks her way over the gravel in her thin heels. The peacock mews an alarm as she approaches, but doesn’t charge. She lets herself inside, shuts the heat and sun and wildlife outside. The house smells of coffee and microwave popcorn.

She walks into Mulder’s office and finds him hunched at his desk, typing. “Hey,” she says, and drops a kiss on his head. There’s a sketch of Baphomet taped to his monitor, her worn flash cards atop a tome about Raëlism.

He turns in his chair. He puts his arms around her hips. “Hey.” 

“Kevin behaved himself,” she offers.

“You two will be friends yet, you’ll see.”

She peers at the computer. “You get a lot done today?”

Mulder shrugs. “Eh, a bit. Waiting on a few emails, and I had to run that tubing to drain the sump down into the woods. Ate up most of the afternoon.”

Scully shakes her head in admiration. “I don’t know how you manage all the multitasking.”

“Well, the book helps me avoid the house, and the house helps me avoid the book. It’s a perfect system. That Ybarra guy still riding your ass?”

She chews her lip. “No,” she lies. “I think we’re okay now.”

“Good,” he says. “I’d hate to have to beat up a priest.”

***

Scully gazes at herself in the empty locker room. She looks thin and tired, and her hair is frizzing up, even pulled back like this. All her makeup has sweated off except for smudged crescents of mascara. Her bra is the color of a Band-Aid, her underwear white and sensible. Between the two is the hard white rose of her gunshot scar, like a second navel, an artifact of a second birth. It is numb when she touches it, indifferent. There are no stretch marks from William, a tale missing from the anthology of her skin. She unhooks her bra, lets it slide down to the damp floor. Scully turns to observe her body in profile. The scar is gone this way, the tattoo hidden as well, and she smooths her hands along her ribs. Her breasts seem out of place to her when they are unbound, frivolous somehow. Vestigial. 

She looks away.

***

The hospital is labyrinthine, having been constructed of various additions when funds allowed. There are dead ends, pointless staircases, and a mysterious storage closet filled with old televisions. She makes little maps on notepaper. 

“So where did you work before this?” an orthopedic surgeon asks her.

A diner in Wyoming. 

“I was out West for a while,” she says.

***

A week in, and Mulder has made a cake to celebrate. A bouquet of Kevin’s shed tail feathers ornaments the table.

An offering, Mulder calls it, tickling her chin with one.

A week down, she thinks, and blows out the candle. She wonders when she’ll stop counting the time.

***

Shy, he gives her a chapter to read. It’s good, and she tells him so. It’s very good. She hears his voice in her head when she reads it, his passion. She loves the esoterica tucked into his gyri and sulci.

“Your prose was never this clear in your reports,” she remarks. 

“Hey if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

Scully laughs. “You want to read a few medical reports?”

He looks at her, suddenly serious. “Yeah,” he says. “I would. It would be nice to hear about your day for once.”

She wonders if love is the weapon that lets them wound so casually.

***

“You’re late,” Ybarra says softly. 

She doesn’t explain that she’d somehow ended up at the TV closet again, that the room numbering system in this hospital had been designed by nihilists, that the nursing student had Dermabonded her glove to a patient’s forehead.

She lowers her eyes like she did at Catholic school. She promises to do better.

***

“What’s going on?” Mulder asks her for what feels like the hundredth time. “Talk to me, Scully.”

She presses her hands to her face for a moment, drops them to her sides. “Nothing,” she says again, frustrating them both. “I’m tired. It’s a hard schedule.”

He places a throw pillow on his lap and pats it. “Come here,” he says. “Please.”

She acquiesces, curling on her side with her back to him. He runs his fingers through her hair, traces the Fibonacci spirals of her ear. She wants to relax, to melt into his touch. She indulges in a Mulderesque conspiracy theory that the hospital microdoses the water with tetanus toxin to keep everyone rigid and tense.

Scully gazes at the windows, at the hard white light of summer streaming in. The curtains are blue with an arabesque pattern, and they looked very chic in the store. She wonders now if they seem desperate in this odd little house. She thinks of Meg March, dressed up in borrowed finery at the Moffats’ ball.

***

Scully clomps up the steps to the porch and kicks her rain boots off next to the umbrella stand. It contains four umbrellas and a gnarled hickory limb that Mulder claims is going to be polished into a fine walking stick one of these days. She goes into the house and is dismayed to find it stale and stifling and dark. Dust motes waft in Brownian motion through shafts of sunlight, undirected by fans or air conditioning. 

“Mulder,” she calls, and there is silence.

She twists her hair into a bun as she pads upstairs, old wood satiny under her bare feet. She pushes open the bedroom door, and the air is hot and still. 

“Mulder?” She needs his help with her zipper, but there is no reply.

She wrestles herself out of her silk sheath, sticky and irritating, and lets it puddle on the floor. Her bra follows. She feels guilty, as Mulder has turned out to be a surprisingly diligent housekeeper. His office is filled with perilous stacks of home improvement books and arcane journals about lake monsters, the walls papered with clippings and blurry photographs, but he seems able to quarantine his own entropy.

She is trying to do the same.

Scully pulls on soft cotton pajama shorts, a gray tank top imbued with the compressive powers of Lycra. She uses lotion to rub away the mascara beneath her eyes. She goes downstairs and out the back door, shielding her eyes against the piercing sunlight. A mosquito whines at her ear and she pinches it out of the air.

“Still got those reflexes, kid,” Mulder says from somewhere off to her left. 

She turns and sees him crouched next to the hulking green block of the transformer. “All the lights are off, and the house feels like a rainforest. I take it you’ve had an eventful day?”

He sighs. “Not really. Well, not the event I was hoping for, which is the power coming back on. There was a pretty heavy thunderstorm around one and that’s when the electricity blew.”

She sits on the bottom step, knees drawn up. She likes to watch him working, a side of him they’re both still learning about. There was never much call for home maintenance at Hegal Place, or living out of cash-only motels. “You call the power company?”

He huffs. “Yeah, they told me they had no reported outages and the power should be fine. I explained that I was _trying_ to report an outage and that it definitely was _not_ fine and she promised someone would be here between tomorrow and eventually.”

Scully smiles. “And that’s why you’re out here toying with death?”

“Not much else to do, really. Can’t write with the power out.” Mulder sits back on his heels and shrugs. “You, uh, have a good day?”

She hadn’t. “Yep. Starting to feel like part of the team.”

“Good. You need to get your career standards as high as your standards for men,” he says, getting to his feet.

“Oh, well, that’s an obviously unattainable bar.”

“Obviously.” He sits next to her on the step. “You wear that to work? You know I think bras are a tool of the patriarchy and you shouldn’t bother, but I’m just surprised Our Lady of Perpetual Shame takes such a liberal view.”

She laughs a little. “I figured as long as I tossed a lab coat over it, I’d look like a real doctor. It worked when I was a kid.”

“Hey, that’s what I did with my badge half the time. Listen, Scully. The house is pretty tropical. You want to bunk up in a hotel until they get the power sorted out?”

Scully thinks about the convenience it would afford. Maids and room service and maybe a pool, depending. But she is tired of hotels, even nice ones. She is tired of polite signs that remind her that the pillows and towels and hairdryers aren’t hers, the tiny toiletries an indicator of her temporary status. She is tired of living out of suitcases and dressers that made her clothes smell strange, tired of running from her own life. She wants to be home.

“Nah,” she says. “We’ll manage.”

Mulder looks surprised, but doesn’t question it. “I’ll call Lowe’s about getting a generator delivered tomorrow. We ought to have one anyway out here.”

She’d always had a vague idea that Mulder had money - it was the only explanation for his complete disinterest in it. But when they’d come back, when they’d talked to his lawyers, she'd been staggered. The Vineyard house alone explained his casual international jaunts. They can have things now, endless things, and there is something frantic in her that wants to spend the money. Bingeing chocolate bunnies after Lent.

Mulder peels his shirt off, wadding it into a limp ball. He tosses it so that it hooks over the doorknob. “Still got it,” he says. He preens.

“Does the NBA realize the tremendous talent they’re missing out on?” she asks. “Do they even know that, at this very moment, a six foot tall middle aged white man is out here flinging his clothing a distance of several feet?”

He snuggles up to her, wrapping his sweaty arms around her shoulders. 

“Ugh,” she says, and pushes at him. “Mulder, you’re disgusting and it’s a thousand degrees out here.” 

“Hoping that cold, cold heart of yours might cool me off.” She sniffs disdainfully, and he releases her. “Scully, how do you feel about bees?”

“We have a history, bees and I,” she observes, tapping the back of her neck.

Mulder curls his hand over the scar, kneads the muscles there. “Well, these wouldn’t be fancy bees.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “I’m not inherently opposed. Why do you want bees, Mulder?”

He shrugs. “I’m getting older, and I’ve got to consider funeral plans. The last one didn’t really go as expected, so I thought maybe I’d mellify myself this time.”

She nods. “Makes sense. I mean, of course, there’s no actual proof that mellification actually occurred, but that’s never stopped you.”

“I also like honey,” he adds. “And bees are good for the planet.”

“Honey often contains botulism spores,” she remarks. “Botulinum toxin is the most lethal toxin known, and it’s estimated that as little as 40 grams of it would be enough to kill everyone on earth.” She doesn’t say you shouldn’t give it to babies, that she sweetened her smoothies with dates and maple syrup so that -

“Well, nobody better piss off my bee army and me,” he says darkly. 

“Everybody eventually pisses you off. Mulder, is that old tent in the shed still? We could sleep in that tonight.”

He shakes his head. “Heavy mildew and dry rot, so I threw it out. We could sleep out here if you want, though. We’ve got that big air mattress.”

“Let’s do that,” she says. “We can put it on the porch. Tell you what - you get stuff together, and I’ll even make dinner.” Scully doesn’t like cooking, but she wants to create order, to complete a finite task. She can be domesticated again, like a lost house cat finally returned to a hearth.

“We having eggs or peanut butter?” he asks, smirky.

“I’d hate to spoil the surprise,” she snips, and goes back into their sauna of a house. 

In the kitchen, she stands in front of the open fridge, letting the delicious leftover cold soak into her skin. She’ll deal with the spoiled food later. Eggs had, actually, been her plan but it’s just too hot. The stove doesn’t work, and she doesn’t have the fortitude to turn the grill on. She finds some leftover shrimp pasta that Mulder has made, some vegetables, and assembles it all into a passable salad.

There, she thinks, pleased. I’d pay twelve bucks for that somewhere. She uses her foot to scratch a mosquito bite on her calf.

Her skin is clammy, hair stringy and damp from sweat. Maybe they should just go to a hotel after all. Perhaps she should stop ascribing symbolism to every damn thing and enjoy herself once in a while. But she thinks of packing, of driving, of unpacking and somehow it’s all too much and her eyes start to fill and her sinuses sting.

Scully pinches her wrist until it passes, feeling weak and hating the weakness in herself. It’s the heat, it’s the exhaustion, it’s the heavy mental load. She considers going outside for a dip in the pond, but suspects the water will be unpleasantly warm. Instead, she drags herself back upstairs for a cold shower.

She sits on the edge of the bed, weary, and stares at a framed picture of a sea turtle on the far wall. If she lets her eyes drift out of focus, it looks like it’s swimming. She tips her head back for a better angle, watches it float across her vision. It slips away then, into the black of the deep waters.

***

She startles awake when he touches her shoulder, gasps.

“Jesus,” Mulder says, and sits next to her. “Bad dream?”

Scully sits up, dazed. “What? No, was I asleep?”

“You’ve been out cold for over an hour, but I wanted to make sure you got some food. Water at least, it’s too hot up here.”

She blinks, confused. “I don’t remember,” she says. Peering to her right reveals night outside.

Mulder holds a hand out and she grasps it, letting him pull her to her feet. She wavers and he steadies her, arm about her shoulders. 

“I just need some water,” she says, defensive.

He guides her down the stairs and out the front door onto the porch. The air outside is substantially cooler, a light breeze kissing her face. She settles into a chair, stares deep into the felty dark. She still can’t remember falling asleep. 

Mulder hands her a water bottle from the little table and she rolls it between her palms, the plastic crinkling. “Hey, I thought you were setting up the air mattress out here,” she says.

“No air flow behind the wall,” he replies. “Drink that up like a good girl and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

Scully obeys and feels better. The water tastes stale, but it’s cool and wet. “Maybe you should have my job,” she says, looking up. “Caring for live people is so much work.”

“Everybody eventually pisses me off,” he reminds her. “Come on, Doc.”

She follows him down the steps and around the side of the house. Their property is vast and feral, pocked with mole burrows and rabbit nests. The floodlights are out with the power, and the house is nearly swallowed up by the vast night. Scully glances up at the Milky Way, at the waxing moon, and marvels again at the sky they have out here. We are star stuff, she thinks.

“Moonstruck?” Mulder asks.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.”

“As long as you can tell a hawk from a handsaw,” he says, and tugs her along.

She follows him to the back of the house and then stops, smiling. Mulder has hammered some old two-by-fours into a frame, draped the structure in white bedsheets. Inside, the air mattress is piled with sofa pillows. Outside, camping lanterns, candles, and two strands of solar lights make it into a kind of fairy circle.

“Mulder,” she says, delighted. “This is ridiculous.”

“Indian Guide saves the day,” he says.

“Your architecture badge is definitely more impressive than your fire badge,” she says, walking over to the little tent. He’s brought her salad inside, and there is a cooler packed with ice and water bottles. Cans of bug spray sit at the flap. She crawls inside, suddenly ravenous. 

Mulder joins her on the mattress, which bounces in response. “Remember my water bed?”

She laughs, piling food on a plate for each of them. “What a swinging bachelor you were.”

She remembers the water bed fondly, the leather couch and the fish and the postage-stamp bathroom in his apartment. It shouldn’t hurt still, but it does. She knew herself there, her place on the map. She eats her salad, wistful for Chinese food and beer at that battered coffee table.

“Scully,” he says.

“What?”

“Scully.”

“Just middle-aged nostalgia, I suppose,” she murmurs.

He reaches out to take her hand. “You’re scarcely middle aged.”

She smiles, squeezes his fingers. “If you go by life experience, we’re both about two hundred years old.”

“Like those Galapagos tortoises. But you need to tell me what’s going on at work. You won’t disappoint me.”

It can be very disagreeable to live with a profiler.

Scully drops his hand. She bites at the fleshy part of her thumb. This is real, she thinks. This place. _It is not down in any map; true places never are_. She can only deflect for so long, and her armor is rusting away. “I’m afraid,” she whispers, then chances a look at his face.

His eyes are soft, searching. “Why?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know, I don’t…” Her sinuses sting again and she presses her palms hard into her eyes. “Please.”

Mulder’s hand on her back, in endless, gentle figure eights. He pulls the elastic from her hair and lets it tumble down to her shoulders. He shifts so that her back is to him, his long legs on either side of her body.

“Mulder, what -”

“Shhhh,” he says, and gathers the hair at the crown of her head. “It’s not a real sleepover if you don’t get your hair French braided.”

Scully blinks. “Since when do you know how to braid hair?”

“Little sister, absent parents. Now stop moving and talk.”

She keeps her head very steady, thinking of her own sister’s deft fingers when their mother was too busy for anything but ponytails. Mulder tugs at another little section of hair. Scully thinks she might be okay if she isn’t looking at him, if she can’t read herself in his eyes.

Moth shadows dance across the white sheet wall, drawn to the flickering candles outside. It fascinates her that they never figure out that fire burns. “I don’t know how to do this,” she says, and her voice is thick.

“To talk, or to be still?” he says in his Oxford psychologist voice.

She isn’t sure of what she means either. “Yes,” she says, with a hiccupy laugh. “Both.”

“Me too,” he says, slipping his thumb through the strands behind her ear. “I don’t know how to do this.”

She swallows hard. “I just...I’ve always had something to consume me. I had the FBI, we traveled all the time, and then we were running and I thought it was hard but it was so easy to just survive. There were no decisions. I didn’t care about, I don’t know...plates.”

He pauses in his work. “Plates?”

Scully chews at a hangnail, frustrated. “Just things, the things you buy for a house. Long term things. I did with William and then…” she trails off, her chest tight. “I feel like I’m playing a game sometimes, like improv theater. Fox and Dana Build A Home.”

“Fox and Dana?” he repeats. “Surely not.”

“Well, we’re hardly Mulder and Scully anymore, are we?” Her stomach clenches and that’s it, she sees. That’s the fear.

He finishes the braid and fastens the elastic at the end of it. “Of course we are,” he says. “We are who we are.”

She turns to him then, the whispering anxiety back with a roar. “And who is that, Mulder? I was plain old Dana Scully until I met you. And we had this life, this strange and wonderful and terrible life where I was Scully because I was your partner and now that’s over. It’s all nothing.” She’s crying openly now, quietly, and it feels cleansing.

“You’re still my partner,” he says, and his eyes are shining too.

She wipes her nose with a paper napkin. “Am I? At what? I go to work and see patients but I forgot there’s no closure with the living. People get sick and get better and get sick again. It doesn’t end. And this house, the power is always going to go out and the chickens will always be hungry and -“ she stops, feeling hysterical.

“You don’t have to work,” he says softly. “The settlement from the FBI, my inheritance…”

She shakes her head. “You know I have to work.” 

He sighs, rubs her knee. “I know you do. But it doesn’t have to be this. It doesn’t have to drain you.”

He’s right, of course he’s right, but he’s also so terribly wrong that she wonders if he knows her at all. She has to be a doctor for her father, for William. For him. She has to see something through. Scully smooths her hand over the back of her head, feeling the even ridges of the braid. Mulder is so competent with everything he does, so easy with himself. He’ll get his damned bees and become some kind of honey magnate in no time.

“People at the hospital, they ask me what I did before. And I don’t know how to answer. How can I possibly answer that question? I just say I was with the government, but that isn’t really the answer, is it?”

Mulder shrugs. He’s never felt the need to explain himself to people. “It’s true.”

Scully stretches out on her stomach across the mattress, chin on the pillows, watching the moths again. They tumble like acrobats, untethered in the thick air. “There’s this number called Graham’s number, used in Ramsey Theory, which is, well, nevermind. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was in the Guinness Book for being the largest specific number used in a proof at the time. And Mulder, this number is so big that writing out all the digits would exceed the bounds of the known universe.”

“Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully.”

She rolls onto her back to glare at him. “Yes they do, they give them Nobel prizes. Anyway. A whole new notation system, Knuth Notation, had to be developed to express these massive numbers. Graham’s Number, Tree(3), et cetera. And I feel like that at times. That there’s this endless amount of vital, inexpressible information inside of me that is so essential but that I have no way to share.”

She blinks a few times, spent by this unburdening.

Mulder stretches out next to her, propped on his side. “You can express it to me,” he says, massaging her temple with his thumb.

Scully closes her eyes. “I feel like a ghost sometimes. How do you do it, Mulder? How do you just keep moving forward without getting lost?”

He sighs. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you have a tendency to compile people into perfect specimens, then measure yourself against that imaginary standard. It’s the precession of simulacra.”

She looks at him, indignant, then realizes he could be right. “Well,” she says. “It’s possible. But Mulder, is that such a bad thing, to want to hold myself to the highest goals?”

He tugs her onto her side so that she’s facing him, nearly nose to nose. Her lips feel tingly. “Yes,” he says, stroking her hair. “When the goal isn’t attainable. And when it puts everyone else on pedestals where we’re ill equipped to balance. And when it puts you in a constant state of frustration and anxiety. No one is perfect. Not even you.”

“I don’t want to be perfect,” she lies. “And I don’t need you to be either.” That part is true, at least.

He laughs in reply. “Apropos of being Galapagos tortoises, Charles Darwin once said ‘I am very poorly today, and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’”

“He rode the tortoises,” Scully says, calming. “I can’t defend his methodology.”

“See? You’re better than Charles Darwin.” He kisses her forehead.

“Well,” she says. “Well.”

“Scully, look. You’re not alone here, feeling at sea. I went to the feed store and some guy picked a fight, shoved me pretty hard with his shoulder. And this reflexive part of my brain wanted to grab my badge, stick it in his face, and put him against the wall for assaulting a federal agent. But I ignored it and bought the chicken feed and just headed out. And I felt like, is this who I am now? Some pushover with yard birds and home improvement books?”

“You made a little fast and loose with your authority sometimes,” she says, thinking of Roche. She curves her palm against his cheek, thumbs the fine ridge of his zygomatic bone.

He bumps her nose with his. “You broke into a secret morgue.”

“You made me.” She sniffles, laughs a little. “The good old days.”

“These can be the good days too,” he says. “They can, if we work at it.” He traces her mouth with his finger.

“Okay,” she says. Hope stirs in her, a thing with feathers. “Partners?”

“Partners.”

He kisses her, in their small tent, in their ring of light.


End file.
